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Russia Pledges To Go To the Moon
An anonymous reader writes: Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has announced it intends to bring humans to the Moon by roughly 2030. Russia plans a full-scale exploration of the Moon's surface. Agency head Oleg Ostapenko said that by the end of the next decade, "based on the results of lunar surface exploration by unmanned space probes, we will designate [the] most promising places for lunar expeditions and lunar bases.
It's not an Invasion.
It's a humanitarian effort to bring supplies to the lunies.
Vladimir Putin: I wanna invade the United States! ... ... ... ... THE MOON.
Advisor: Your majesty, that is most unwise at this point in time. I think you
Vladimir Putin: Then I wanna invade Georgia!
Adviser: Your majesty, as you recall we tried that already and
Vladimir Putin: Then I wanna invade Ukraine!
Adviser: Your majesty, that is already in progress as your ordered on your birthday
Vladimir Putin: *looks around the dinner table for invasion inspiration* I wanna invade Turkey!
Adviser: Your majesty! What has come over you? You know you're limited by doctrine to one invasion per year!
Vladimir Putin: *pouts and looks out the window* I wanna invade
Adviser: *murmurs quietly with other advisers* And, you promise this will be the last invasion? This will use up all your invasion credits, you know.
Vladimir Putin: Yes.
Adviser: Okay then finish your peas and we'll make a press release tomorrow.
Vladimir Putin: But I don't wanna finish my peas! I hate you, I hate you! You never let me do anything fun! I wish I was never born!
I bet Vladimir Putin isn't man enough to leave next month and travel to the moon, then plant the Russian flag on the surface of it.
Wouldn't work. When they show the picture of him planting that flag on the moon while not wearing a shirt everyone will know it was photoshopped.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"We choose to go to the moon in the next two decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they will take attention away from what's happening with the Ukraine." -- V. Putin
Going to the moon while the economy is crumbling, foreign countries are invaded and human rights are being trampled.
Are you talking about the U.S. or Russia?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm glad people like you exist.
No matter how unthinking and stupid I am sometimes, I will never, ever, ever say something as dumb as this argument is right now.
And, they will correctly point out that you've not been there in decades and are resting on your laurels.
Want to impress us? Beat them there again.
Otherwise you're just reliving glory days.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Regardless of what anyone 'agreed' to 50-odd years ago, that's what's going to happen in the next 50-odd years, and it looks like China and Russia are going to be competing to see which one breaks the seal first. If the U.S. wants in on the party, we'd better get off our increasingly large asses and get moving.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Seems like the cooling relations between the US and Russia are already resulting in a lot more spaceflight initiatives. It's a shame that we cannot "yearn for the stars" out of wonder instead of conflict and competition.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
In Putin's Russia, Chuck Norris copied him.
NASA peaked at 4.41% of federal budget in 1966. That is nowhere near ~5% of GDP. Also what other than Apollo 1 disaster are you referring to as "sheer amount of failures"? It was overwhelmingly successful by most any reasonable assessment.
By the time NASA arrives on the moon, its astronauts would be able to get chow mein, vodka, AND tandoori chicken from the locals.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There have been so few because, as it turns out, the moon is a terribly uninteresting place with really annoying dust.
"Terribly uninteresting"? How quaint.
The moon is the single best opportunity for the expansion of space exploration.
Guess what? Rockets large enough to send out to the asteroid belt with people in them, as a practical matter, are too damned big to launch from Earth. Did I hear "build them in orbit"? Nope. Too difficult, slow, and expensive. At our current level of technology you really need gravity to do practical construction on a very large scale. 1/6 the gravity? Perfect! Rockets built there don't have to be very large at all.
The moon has vast natural resources; they merely need to be extracted from the rock. Oxygen is one of them. There is also a surprising amount of fissionable material available. So... given some initial energy and material input, you can probably have sustained output, without too much "resupply" coming from Earth. And while energy requirements of a colony might be high, there are vast amounts of solar energy available, and plenty of silicon and trace elements to make solar cells.
Etc., etc. Our current U.S. government administration might be clueless about these things, but in the long run, the moon is our greatest hope for the future.
>The ultimate high ground is certainly not the moon. Anything you lob at the Earth from there must first get out of the lunar gravity well, which would require a pretty significant expenditure of fuel.
Not really - the moon's gravity well is radically shallower than the Earth's, far shallower than the difference in surface gravity would suggest (the moon's surface is far closer to it's center, and thus gravity falls off far faster with altitude.) I can't be bothered to do the math, but if xkcd is to be believed the energy to launch a given rock from the moon launch would be about 20x lower than from Earth. Meanwhile that rock would have 20x more kinetic energy when it slammed into Earth than if it were being slammed into the moon.
More to the point the Moon offers shelter, concealment, an essentially unlimited supply of rocks to throw, and plenty of nuclear fuel as a root energy source. High ground involves more than just altitude after all - there's a world of difference between "having the high ground" and "being treed". If you're in open space you're pretty much treed - everyone can se *exactly* where you are, and you have no resources except those you tak with you.
As for lauching from the far side of the moon, that would probably be wise if you wanted to take your victims by surprise, and if you want to hit something specific you'll have to precisely navigate the non-trivial gravitational field of a binary planet regardless of where the launch point is, circling half way around the moon isn't going to make things that much more difficult when you're trying to throw a dart and hit a bulls-eye hundreds of thousands of km away across a constantly shifting gravitational landscape.
But then again, why would you need to take them by surprise? What good does it do to get a few hours warning that a city is about to be reduced to a smoking crater? You can't even begin to evacuate in that amount of time. At best you could try to intercept the incoming projectile with a high yield missile, presumably nuclear - in which case if you were successful then instead of vaporizing the city you end up covering the state with radioactive buck shot - after all blowing up an projectile doesn't significantly change it's trajectory. Plus that interceptor was probably a hell of a lot more expensive to build and launch than the rock it hit. Now multiply that by the fact that it's 20x cheaper to throw a rock at the Earth from the Moon than vice versa, and you get 20x the yield on impact, and the Moon has a 400x gravitational force multiplier on it's side. For every rock we could throw at them they could throw 400 smaller rocks back, each of which would do just as much damage as ours.
And of course they would have every bit as much warning as us about incoming projectiles crossing the 385,000km void - launch a missile at the moon and they can launch a cloud of gravel to intercept and destroy it. Make it heavy gravel and the interception doubles as a counterstrike.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.